Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden Seek to Turn Back the Clock at
It was 1985 and a fresh-faced Xi Jinping’s first trip to the U.S. (or anywhere outside of China, so it’s believed.) The 31-year-old princeling, dressed in a brown jacket over a gray pullover and a neatly knotted necktie, smiles carelessly for the camera in front of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Countless enthralled tourists have struck the same pose both before and after. Back then, Xi was a junior Chinese official leading a delegation to the U.S. to study modern agriculture techniques. Xi visited the U.S. four more times before he assumed China’s leadership in late , and has returned four times since, most recently sharing chocolate cake with former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. At that meeting, Trump hailed the “great chemistry” between the leaders and foresaw “lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away.”As predictions go, it wasn’t one of Trump’s best, and relations between the world’s top two economies have spiraled in the six years since. Changing that trajectory will be top of the agenda when Xi returns to San Francisco on Tuesday for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, with a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden set for Wednesday.“The two heads-of-state will have in-depth communication on strategic, general and directional issues concerning China-U.S. relations, as well as major issues concerning global peace and development,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular briefing on Monday.The stakes are high for both sides. The slight thaw that resulted from Xi and Biden’s November summit in Bali was put back into a deep freeze in February after the United States downed an alleged Chinese spy balloon. Today, Washington has blocked the sale of high-tech components to China, ramped up arms sales to Taiwan, and has backed the Philippines over fresh skirmishes with the People Liberation Army (PLA) in the South China Sea.Meanwhile, China’s economy is mired in a severe downturn, with youth unemployment at 46.5%, by some estimates, while the world’s top trading nation again veered into deflation in October. One measure of foreign direct investment into China fell negative in the third quarter of 2023 for the first time on record
